Einstein, That Clown: Special Relativity Refuted at Bull's Smokin' BBQ

If he’d take it as a compliment, I’d call him the Einstein of West Morena Boulevard. That’s where Tony Iaquinta holds forth in his restaurant, Bull’s Smokin’ BBQ. It’s mighty good food, the barbecued ribs, smoked salmon, pulled pork, and brisket of beef that he offers up between conversational visits to your table. Customers can sit indoors in front or outdoors on the patio, where dogs are allowed if they don’t wander away from their owners. Enclosed by an iron fence, the patio sports heat lamps, a pile of cushions to put on your chair, and a computer hooked up to a large screen in the rear.

On the computer one evening, well before Iaquinta treated his clientele to an Eagles concert on the big screen, he showed me a YouTube demonstration of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. (It is “special” because it deals only with the special case of objects in constant, invariant motion; acceleration leads one on toward the more advanced “general” relativity.) The short video is an animated presentation of two spaceships moving in relation to each other. “It’s very well done and an accurate picture of special relativity,” Iaquinta told me. “Trouble is, it’s wrong.” He meant, of course, that the theory is wrong. That Einstein was wrong. To put a more emphatic point on it, Iaquinta often claims that the famous scientist was nothing more than “a clown.”

Einstein fared much better among San Diegans in the early 1930s, when he visited from Germany three times in conjunction with visits to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. On the morning of December 31, 1930, a reception for Einstein was held at the organ pavilion in Balboa Park. Later, Einstein and his wife Elsa toured the city and lunched with local dignitaries at the U.S. Grant Hotel before being whisked off to Pasadena. The following day, he attended the Rose Parade. He spent the next three months as a visiting scholar at Caltech and even became a temporary Hollywood celebrity, hobnobbing with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and other actors. After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the Einsteins immigrated to the United States, where Albert took a permanent teaching position at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Today, Tony Iaquinta isn’t the first to think Einstein got special relativity wrong. But during my visit to Iaquinta’s restaurant, I was taken aback at hearing him articulate a cogent refutation of the theory — whether it does the trick I am not qualified to judge. The surprise I felt speaks more to stock opinions I hold than to anything about Iaquinta or Einstein (the genius knew everything, right?). In 1905, after all, Einstein was still working as a clerk in a patent office when he published the paper that began a revolution in modern physics. Iaquinta, in order to complete a civil engineering degree in the late 1960s, studied physics at Cal State Los Angeles.

Iaquinta, who is 64, moves steadily among his customers, chatting them up in a deep sandpaper voice and bringing water and cups of ice cream to their tables. Wire-rimmed glasses perch above his round tanned face, and his slightly graying hair is combed straight back. He came to the United States from his native Italy in 1954. His family first moved to Pennsylvania, where he eventually started college at the University of Pittsburgh. After his freshman year, he came to California to complete his education in the less expensive state university system. Iaquinta eventually went to work as an engineer for the Bechtel Corporation, then spent 30 years as an independent building contractor. When the economy soured, he decided to open a restaurant.

For the past eight years, Iaquinta has worked during his spare time on a paper that he hopes will correct an error so glaring he can’t understand how it still persists as truth. He told me that early on he started sending versions of the paper to a physics website. “Within a week or so,” he said, “I’d always get back a message pointing out mistakes in my explanation. The guy never identified himself, but the critiques always improved my paper. Recently, I’ve gotten nothing from him, even though I sent my latest draft six months ago. He must have either died or lost interest. The way I take it is that he thinks I finally got things right.”

Iaquinta’s heroes in the history of physics are Galileo and Isaac Newton, and his paper consists largely of a dialogue between them. They are portrayed (including visually, in cartoon-character images) as speaking to Einstein, pointing out his mistakes. From the paper and several conversations I had with Iaquinta, I have distilled the simplest summary of his argument I can think of.

Before Einstein, Galileo explained the relativity of motion too. But his version was thought not capable of incorporating the phenomenon of light. Most people are familiar with Galilean relativity. Imagine people riding in a train that is traveling at a constant speed of 50 miles per hour. This means the people, the train car they sit in, and every object in the car are traveling 50 miles an hour as well. One person holds a cannonball at eye level, then drops it to the floor. Though the cannonball is going forward as fast as everything else in the car, the people notice only its downward motion. But say that you are standing trackside looking through the car window as the train goes by. What you will see is the cannonball move diagonally forward and downward, a combination of movements. So there are two perceptions, each dependent, or “relative,” to the perspectives of those who are watching.

Imagine the same scenario with a pistol attached to the ceiling of the train car and pointing downward toward the floor. There is a bullet in the pistol’s chamber. Someone activates the trigger, and the gun fires. At this point, we have to imagine that all who watch are so hypersensitive that they can see the bullet’s motion. The people inside the car see it travel downward. From the side of the tracks, you see it move diagonally forward and downward, because remember that the bullet inside the pistol at the time of its firing was already moving forward with everything else in the car.

Comments

For once, the restaurant owner is correct, and Einstein wrong. There are almost 2000 scientists in our database - most of them would agree with Tony. The database is at http://www.worldsci.org.
I am finishing a 6-year feature documentary called Einstein Wrong (http://www.einsteinwrong.com) that we hope to hit the big film festivals world-wide in 2011. It has a great chance of opening up this subject world-wide. Even GPS that "popular" media claims uses Einstein's relativity does not in fact. Physics and cosmology need an overhaul. Just ask any engineer but don't ask a "theoretical" scientist - at not least at any university.

A couple of more things... Looks like the links go messed up in the comment. http://www.worldsci.org and http://www.einsteinwrong.com. Einstein is a god and it seems blasphemous to say he is wrong but the truth is, he is wrong. A restaurant owner will not lose his job or livelihood criticizing this while university and peer groups do. Science ALWAYS changes for the better from people outside who don't have the cloudy vision of peer pressure pressing down on them.

The Holy Grail in empirical science is to create a hypothesis that is verifiable by repeated experiments and that TURNS THE SCIENTIFIC WORLD UPSIDE DOWN. This requires the ability to communicate ideas to others who are qualified to understand what it is about that novel new idea that revolutionizes any given scientific field. This is the gold standard for bringing great credit to a lifetime of academic study and effort; otherwise, remember that the world is full of crackpots.

Study the life of Sir Isaac Newton as to delaying publication of a great new theory, in competition with another...

Everyone is free to take a look at the list of 1800-odd persons claimed as scientists at the web site you referenced. There are more Nobel Prize winners on the faculty of the University of California at San Diego than in that entire bunch you reference, and they got those prizes BY TURNING THEIR RESPECTIVE FIELDS UPSIDE DOWN WITH NEW THEORIES THAT WERE INDEPENDENTLY VERIFIED BY THEIR PEERS.

This Einstein-disproving theory may have been conceived at a BBQ, but it does not appear able to stand the heat of rigorous academic scrutiny by the theorist's own admission.

He is free to publish and prove me wrong. If he does, then I would still be proud of my part in goading him into the spotlight.

I can bend light by reflecting it off a mirror or directing it through water. I can break it apart into separate colors with a prism. I ain't no physicist, just a clown who was given a math degree with honors as a friendly parting gift.

A physicist (which I am not) may have something to say about absolute references, especially regarding this planet orbiting the sun orbiting the center of the galaxy spinning through space...

I'm tempted to wonder what else is smoked at the BBQ. What happens if high schoolers start tearing it apart? The theory, not the BBQ!

For an example of a Theory of Everything as a Grand Unification Theory (or GUT to real nerds) that relates the standard particle physics model with gravity by embedding them both into a non-associative structure called a Lie algebra, see A. Garrett Lisi's papers, written after his graduation from UCSD:

Lisi's work has had some peer review in critical articles but to my knowledge has not been published in a peer-reviewed theoretical physics journal. Still, it has religious implications for me as to empirical science one day proving the existence of God.

I don't guarantee that Einstein is absolutely correct; it is possible that someone who knows what he or she is doing can refine the accepted theories of relativity in some way. On the other hand, there is about a century of empirical verification of the results that are predicted by those relativistic theories.

The comments about listening to engineers in the field while disregarding physicists at universities is interesting because all engineers generally complete three university semesters or quarters of calculus-based physics BEFORE starting their engineering major courses. For an example of the infallibility of engineers who may have brain-flushed shortly after graduation, search for the news video seen today for the botched demolition job where a large tower just "fell the wrong way." Great job, dudes.

I think LaQuinta is substantially correct in refuting Einstein, but he is missing some important information about light, but first some correction about GPS as you mention SDSU Physics Prof. Calvin Johnson. I think Engineers made GPS work by trial & error in spite of wrong science. The GPS works not because of science but in spite of wrong science advocated in Einstein’s SRT. The GPS practice is opposite of Einstein's SRT. Einstein got mass increase & time dilatiion backwards. Instead of mass increase it should be mass reduction and instead of time dilation its time contraction such that traveling twin ages more and faster.

I am using Contraction as positive and dilation as negative. Relativistic time contraction of 45.66 Microseconds per day (24 Hrs) along the circumference of the earth & gravitational time dilation of 7.26 microseconds/day radially per Galileo’s pendulum formula. So GPS engineers slow down GPS clocks by 45.66-7.26 = 38.4 microseconds per day to synch with ground based clocks. This is proof positive as circumference 45.66 = 7.26 X 2π

Light has no need to travel in the absence of a medium & Sound cannot travel without a medium

Light travels as wave & interacts as photons.

Sound speed increases with density. Light speed decreases with density even to zero for opaque media.

Light waves are invisible (like steam until it condenses in the atmosphere. In other words in order to see a light beam there must be some atmosphere preferably with some impurities.

Galilean and Special relativity both follow the same premises:
a) A ball dropped in a moving train appears to an observer in the moving train as going vertically straight down, but to an observer on the platform it appears to move diagonally forward (Actually it’s more like the arc of a parabola)
b) A bullet fired from the roof/ceiling of a train also has the same fate but requires supersensitive observers.
c) A laser beam fired from roof or ceiling also has the same fate but requires hyper-imaginary observer. In other words Galilean and Einsteinian relativist agree that appears to an observer in the moving train as going vertically straight down, but to an observer on the platform it appears to move diagonally forward. Einstein’s mistaken logic here is that photons as particles behave like bullets and balls.

However Our Pal disagrees because light travels as waves and only interacts as photons. The visible laser beam is manifestation of the light wave wherever it encounters air molecules or impurities in the atmosphere as Photons so, these photons are not photons all the time from ceiling to the floor but only intermittently as a function of train speed, density of air & impurities, whether there is any draft due to windows open/shut or air-conditioning etc or if the observers are talking or merely passive observers (almost dead)

I'm only going to say that it has been a long, LONG time since I've seen the "aether" argument that light cannot travel through the vacuum of space. It was quite popular back in the 14th century, back when a physician was somebody in possession of a bottle of leeches and the height of mathematics was a college-level understanding of accounting. I am pretty sure this is why that period of time is now referred to as the Dark Age.

OK, I can't help myself. According to the ourpal .com website, "Everything happens in real time. If you see a flare on the Sun or if the sun suddenly vanishes we will know it immediately and not 8 minutes later for the light or gravity to traverse a distance 93 million miles." I can't find an engineer who is qualified under the Business and Professions Code of California to call herself or himself an engineer AND who will buy that one.

Since the perpetrators of the ourpal .com website choose to define words in such a way that the perpetrators at ourpal .com are always "right", the $1000 "challenges" are a joke that cannot be taken seriously.

WARNING: the ourpal .com website contends that it has information on "Litigation". Rely upon and/or use AT YOUR OWN RISK.